Sunspots

The excellent King Kaufman, on yesterday's puzzling Shaq-to-the-Suns trade:

Shaquille O'Neal to the Phoenix Suns for Shawn Marion and Marcus Banks. It just sounds nuts, doesn't it?

That's because it is nuts. But might it be the good kind of nuts? Is it possible that Suns general manager Steve Kerr is a gambling genius, that by rolling the dice on putting a building right smack in the middle of his team's highflying offense, he might finally bring an NBA championship to the desert?

That would be cool, because it's so off the wall. And speaking of the wall, it moved a 16th of an inch in the last year, which would make it quicker than Shaq right now.

As a Pistons fan, I laugh at the idea of the NBA's quickest team-- and a likely opponent if we meet in the NBA Finals-- mucking up their raison d'etre in order to get an aging, out-of-shape superstar with no mobility, one who will cost them $40 million over the next two years. Miami Heat superfan Jeff has blogged before about the tendency in academia to fetishize the superstar name, no matter what that star has actually done lately, and no matter how detrimental such a fetishizing is to the profession. That's kind of what this trade reminds me of, and I wonder what Jeff thinks of it.